The present invention generally relates to a machine interface to allow a user to select a machine operation from amongst a plurality of possible machine operations.
A great deal of effort has been expended in the prior art in order to solve the problem of how to interface a machine to a user to enable a user to more readily control the functioning of a machine.
When there are a plurality of possible machine operations which can be carried out and a user cannot uniquely and immediately identify the operation which the user requires to be carried out, it becomes a problem as to how to interface the machine to the user to enable a machine to quickly and efficiently select a desired machine operation. For example, when accessing a database which contains retrievable information, a user may not know the exact identity of the data which is required, e.g., the file name of a picture or a document. The problem is thus how to interact with the user to extract the necessary information to identify a required record.
This problem is also applicable to directing incoming calls in a call centre. In such a system, a user wishes for a call to be routed to a particular destination but that destination is not known. Thus in order to arrive at the target destination, a user must be prompted to input information. This is typically achieved by asking questions of the user in order to extract the necessary information.
A solution to this problem is disclosed in a paper entitled “A Vector-Based Natural Language Call Routing” by J. Chu-Carroll and B. Carpenter (Computational Linguistics 1999). The solution described in this paper is to receive a query from a user and to calculate and compare a vector for the query with vectors for the nearest documents. If there is uncertainty about the nearest document vector, a new vector is generated which would help to distinguish the nearest document. This vector is then used to generate a further question. The limitation of this system is that the confirming question only allows retrieval terms to be explicitly confirmed or rejected by the user.
In a machine interface which uses such a dialogue between a machine and a user, the user may often require to access the same machine operation, e.g., the same database record, or have the call directed to the same location. However, in order to return to the same point in a dialogue between the machine and the user, it is necessary for the user to repeat the dialogue. This can be a tedious operation for the user.